The Premise

Richard Feynman was a famous Nobel Prize winning physicist, and in 1948 he introduced a diagram to illustrate a difficult idea in physics. These are now called Feynman diagrams. If you Google Feynman diagram, the first one that comes up is this little number here. It's pretty, isn't it? And simple. I got a jewelry version of this Feynman drawing from Etsy. This diagram made it onto jewelry. This particular diagram shows movement through time and space for a particular subatomic occurrence. On the x axis, at the bottom, is space. On the y axis is time. An electron plus a positron annihilates, producing a photon that becomes a quark-antiquark pair after which the antiquark radiates a gluon.

My point is this: in 1948, or thereabouts, maybe much earlier, there was a widely accepted idea - which is still accepted - that particles move backwards in time. So, time isn't fixed. Okay, okay, you say. Even if that was true, so what? I'm not an electron. For me, the world around me, time only moves forward. But does it? Are you sure? Have you ever had an intuition? Ever know what was going to happen before it happened? We attribute these thoughts and feelings to God and guardian angels. I'm not saying that can't be one of the answers. What I am saying is: maybe sometimes that intuition is a memory of what happens in the future.

Let me give you the biggest example of this in my life. A few years ago, I bought a little piece of land to build a house. I was super excited to start drawing out the floor plan and hiring an architect, but instead I immediately became completely obsessed with buying an additional car. This was when car prices were intense because of the pandemic. Prices hadn't yet returned close to normal. It was almost the same price to buy new, unless the car had a ton of miles. I went looking for a new car at the worst time to buy. I was obsessed. Specifically, I was obsessed with safety features. I wanted a safe car. When I found the car I wanted, I was at the dealership rethinking my fiscally poor decision, but also feeling that if I backed out, something terrible would happen. I could feel it, like a threat looming. I bought the car. Less than a year later, that car saved me and my daughter from being seriously injured and might have saved our lives. We were hit so hard that I was immediately knocked unconscious and had a concussion syndrome which lasted for 6 months. There was a not insignificant amount of time where I wondered if I would ever feel like me again. After we were hit, I kept asking over and over, "Where were we going?" I remember thinking it had to be somewhere important. Over and over: "Where were we going? What were we doing?" And over and over my daughter told me: we were going to see the architect. Had we been in one of our older, much smaller cars, this would've been a very different story. And the thing is, I think we were. And I think we weren't.

Fast forward to getting my next car. I was pretty sure a Toyota or a Kia would make the most sense, but somehow, I knew I wouldn't be buying one of those. I saved Hyundai for last. I picked out the model I thought I wanted and decided to go to a dealer that had a non-hybrid version so I could test drive it, then buy the hybrid later. Their website specifically said the hybrid wasn't available, yet I knew I'd be buying a car that day. At the dealership, I found out they had the hybrid. When I walked up and saw what I knew was going to be my car, inside I gasped and thought, "It's white!" Yes, I did get that car. That's the first time my intuition made me angry. I thought I was somewhere new, that I hadn't been here 15 times before, but it turns out I've been here so many times, still. Also..., when you feel that future that's just good, you have to choose it. Again and again. Again and again. So, where's my free will? Where's the variety? Will I be living the same life over and over and over again? If I'm asking me, the answer is yes. I will make the same choice over and over again if it's a good choice. I have to. It doesn't mean I can't be pissed off about it.

We're skirting around the implications of what it means if time isn't linear, but I don't think a lot of people are sold on the idea. There's an excellent book by Caro Rovelli called, "The Order of Time," published in 2017. The audiobook is narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, who does a wonderful job narrating. In it, he argues that time doesn't behave the way we think it does. If I understand the book right, he states that entropy is lower in the past and higher in the future, meaning that the future is easier to change - so we focus on changing the future. Note that there's still entropy in the past. The hint is that there is some room to change the past. Time is an illusion, based on our point of view, because of our limitations. Let's say you buy into this crazy theory. How would that work? Can we get in a time machine? Is Dr. Who real? Not that I know of. There are two movies that perfectly illustrate what I think retro causality would look like in our world. I'll go with the blockbuster first: The Arrival.

In The Arrival, Louise gets a gift. If you haven't seen this movie, these are serious spoilers. You should skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers. The movie did come out several years ago, so I'll keep going. The gift she's given is the ability to see her whole life, mostly in sequence, but sometimes out of order. This memory of the future is why she can walk out as the alien spaceship sends down its transport, why she knows she'll be okay, how she knows what to say to the foreign commander, how she knows the foreign commander's phone number despite having never heard or seen it previously. (He tells her his phone number many months or years later at a party.) When her daughter asks a school related question she pulls the information from the past, but it's in the past where she remembers giving her daughter that information in the future.

Our memory of the future is much hazier in reality. Here, it looks more like the movie Run Lola Run. (Even more spoilers here.) If you've seen Run Lola Run, you probably didn't know it was a movie about time, beyond the 20 minutes she has to help her boyfriend, Manny. Watch it as many times as I have, and you'll start to pick up on some things. In the first attempt at saving Manny, she's unable to get the money she needs from her father. He tells her she's always been crazy, that he won't help her, and that he's not her dad. Oof. She's devastated. He locks her out of the bank, and she has no choice but to go forward and meet Manny empty-handed. When she sees Manny, he's in the middle of an armed robbery. She begs him to stop, but he's already going to go to jail for what he's done so far, and he's determined to see it through. Lola decides to help him. Manny gives her the gun. She hasn't shot a gun before, so he shows her how to remove the safety. They get out of the store with the cash, but they're surrounded by cops outside. An inexperienced cop accidentally shoots Lola, and she lays on the street, dying. That's when it flashes back, to a point in her life when she expresses doubt about her relationship with Manny, and says she needs to make a decision. Does she want to stay? Back in the present, we hear her say that she's not ready to go. "I don't want to go," she says. "Stop." And it starts over. This time, she's experienced massive failure. This time, when she runs out the door she's upset - so upset that she doesn't see the man in the hallway with his dog. He trips her, she falls, and she limps out of her building. She makes it to her father's office where she finds her dad fighting with his mistress. Lola insults the mistress and her dad slaps her. She trashes his office and leaves. As she's leaving the security guard says something along the lines of, "We can't get everything we want." In this case, what she wants is, for her, non-negotiable. She takes the gun and takes the guard as hostage. The guard, who has probably known her for years, says she doesn't know how to use the gun. She shows that she does, though, when she takes the safety off, which she learned how to do in round 1. She used her knowledge of what happened before, even though she doesn't remember. After robbing the bank, she goes to meet Manny. She manages to get there in time, before he goes into the store to rob it. He turns back and begins walking across the street to meet her and gets hit by an ambulance. As he lay dying, it flashes back. Manny is telling Lola that she would forget him if he's gone. Lola says that she loves him and won't let anything bad happen to him. He says she can't control everything, to which she says, "Manny, you're not dead." Back in the present, Manny exclaims something along the lines of, "Oh yeah?" And the whole thing starts again. Once again, Lola decides to call on her dad for help. This time, she leaves more hopeful. She's had a small taste of success. She got the money last time. She growls back at the dog and jumps over the foot which would trip her. She makes it to the office. The security guard greets her, saying, "You're finally here, my dear." at which point they stare at each other awkwardly, like they both know something, but they can't remember what it is. Her dad isn't there, so she moves forward without any plans, asking the universe for help. She's listening. The universe takes her to a casino, and she wins big, after causing quite a scene. When she goes to meet Manny, he's nowhere to be seen. It turns out he found the money he lost and sorted out the fiasco on his own. He makes light of the horrible things that almost happened (or did happen).

I posit to you that this is life. Resetting the game again and again, to make it through to the next level, to have the best things happen to us. Sounds great, right? Multiple chances. What could be wrong with that? At the end of the day, we leave with the best result, right? Yes and no. Here's where the implications come in. What does it mean if we're all making and remaking our choices? If we decide to move to New York in one life path, but not the other? To marry one person in one life path, but another in a different path, or maybe not at all? To have kids, or not have kids, or have different kids? Have different brothers, or sisters, or mothers, or fathers? To live our own lives again and again but with different outcomes every time. To be born and not to be born. These are the implications. So, what are we? Are we even real? If 2023 happens but in this timeline, I was never born, what does that mean? I think it means we're made of stronger stuff. I think it means we're far more interconnected than we thought. I think it means we're more vulnerable, because we're not just trying to make it out of this life relatively unscathed - we're trying to make it out of thousands of lives unscathed, and thousands of variations of our life, without the worst happening. The more rolls, the more likely we are to get a bad roll, and a good roll too. Sure, this time you'll be rich, but what happens next time when you're not? Sure, this time your kids are on the right path, but what about next time when the alcoholic gene kicks in? Did you, personally, make society better or worse for others to live in? Because one day you'll be an "other". Because we aren't unchanging. Our lives aren't fixed. We don't just get the best outcome. We get all the outcomes. Let that sink in. We get all the outcomes. At least, that's what I think. So, let's make all the outcomes better for everyone, and we'll make the outcome better for all of our selves. Selfish generosity. Selfish philanthropy. Selfish advocacy. I'm here for it. Now, time to get better at it.

(P.S. I (very quickly) asked my Buddhist teacher, Tashi Nyima, what he thought about my theory on time, and he basically said, "Yes, but you don't even know the half of it. What we perceive as reality isn't real." So, I reluctantly say that it may be that not only is time not linear, but that the universe is much less real than we think. Scientists have proposed that we may be living in a 3D hologram on a credit card. While I'm not quite on board with this line of thought, there is scientific backing for it. We could all literally be lines of code in a computer program. Even so, I do find that feeling selfishly altruistic makes me feel better than being angry or greedy for my own agenda. I have a long way to go, so wish me luck on my journey. I wish you luck on yours.)

You can check out Tashi's website here: Great Middle Way | NO SECRETS-NO SIDES | निर्गुह्य-निष्पक्ष | NIRGUHYA-NISPAKSA